Wednesday, February 26, 2014

openCarPC controller v1.1

Hi!

In a previous post I have explained how I have interfaced Raspberry PI GPIOs with XBMC, using buttons and rotary encoders.
I have reworked the application which controls this and now there are more features available.
You can use this post to set up the hardware connections between Raspberry PI GPIO connector and as many buttons and rotary encoders as you like(or you have room for on the RPI GPIO pins).

At this moment my setup has 2 rotary encoders, each of them having also a push button.
You can use this tutorial to set up your car steering wheel controls to control this system.

XBMC builtin functions are now supported.
For a list of available XBMC builtin functions have a look at this link.

Groups of commands are supported.
Commands should be separated by the '+' character. For example:xbmcbuiltin_PlayerControl(previous)+KB_minus
will execute both commandsa t once when the corresponding button is pressed, or when the rotary encoder is turned in the correct direction.

Multiple groups of commands are supported.
Groups of commands should be separated by the '>' character.
When the action is triggered(button pressed or rotary encoder rotated in the correct direction) the commands are executed consecutively.
For example:xbmcbuiltin_ActivateWindow(Music)>xbmcbuiltin_ActivateWindow(Videos)
When you press the button for the first time XBMC will switch to Music window. When you press it the second time XBMC will switch to Videos window and when pressed again, XBMC will switch back to Music window.

Note: The groups of commands were designed to support multiple
programs control. At this moment I am working on external radio support
so you can set the volume of radio and volume in XBMC at the same time.
This will be available in a future post.This doesn't mean that you can use multiple XBMC commands at once.

To download the latest version, please checkout the Downloads link from the right of the blog, in the openCarPC tools folder. The current version is 1.1.